It has long been recognized that to develop and manufacture a substantially defect-free product, periodic evaluations are required during a development project to evaluate for potential defects. By periodic review for potential defects during the development of a product there is an improved possibility that fewer defects will be found in the final product ready for marketing. The more sophisticated the product and the amount of time required to develop a product emphasizes the need for peer review evaluation throughout the period of product development. Although peer review applies in the development of a product of any sophistication, peer review evaluation is particularly advantageous in the development of a software product, computer hardware, and computer systems.
Heretofore, peer review evaluation was made by manually completing reports, reviewing each of the reports for potential defects, and then following up to ensure that identified defects were corrected during the period of product development. The paper report peer review evaluation is a time-consuming, costly, and is not known for high reliability.
In addition to the other shortcomings of previous manual peer review evaluations there was also a problem of follow up to ensure that the identified defects were corrected before a product reached the marketplace. The manual reports were difficult to understand the identified defect. In addition, because of the difficulty of collectively evaluating individual peer review committee reports many potential defects were identified when in fact the potential defect was not an actual defect in the product. This further added to the time consumption and cost of peer review evaluation.
Heretofore, the peer review evaluation of a product under development was strictly a paper driven process. Peer review committee members would prepare a written report of what each perceived were potential defects. A peer review meeting was convened and the moderator of the review committee would go through the individual reports on a page by page basis and inquire if any one of the committee members had a potential defect on a particular page of a report that at that time was under review. Any defects noted by the committee members that were accepted by the entire committee were manually annotated on the worksheet of each committee member, and when the review meeting was concluded, all the individual worksheets were used by the committee “author” for the necessary corrective action. The author would go through each worksheet to find all the accepted defects, and correct the report under review. Tracking accepted defects was difficult primarily because the defects only existed on the worksheets of the individual committee members. The moderator during the review meeting would have to reference each defect worksheet of the various committee members while verifying that the corrections had been made for accepted defects. Because of the difficulty, metrics collection was not a part of the paper driven process.
Thus, there is a need for an integrated electronic method for progressive review of a development project to evaluate for potential defects in a product under development prior to marketing the product.